Help Me Choose: Video Cards

Whether you’re gaming, watching DVDs or editing video on your Alienware desktop, the quality of the graphics you experience is only as good as your video card. Along with the computer monitor itself, the video card determines the number of colors that can be displayed, as well as the contrast, resolution and overall gaming graphics.

Discrete video cards can provide better performance, as compared to integrated video cards. Discrete video cards are separate from the motherboard and include a specialized graphics processing unit (GPU). Because of their onboard GPU, discrete video cards don’t have to share the CPU with other programs.

Discrete video cards include memory of their own, measured in gigabytes (GB). Graphics memory is used by the GPU to accelerate graphics performance, store textures using game graphics and make gaming, movies and other entertainment intensely realistic. High-performance graphics cards require a significant amount of graphics memory.

How to get the highest performance

In Aurora and Area-51, NVIDIA® and AMD® video cards use a technology called Scalable Link Interface (SLI™) or CrossFire™ to enable two or three cards to work together when processing graphics data. Naturally, having two or three video cards working together to render graphics increases the available frame rate and provides more depth and detail. With the added horsepower of dual graphics cards, you can use higher-resolution displays and enjoy high-definition (HD) gaming without sacrificing graphics performance.